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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
By the end of the twentieth century, the idea of self-esteem had become enormously influential. A staggering amount of psychological research and self-help literature was being published and, before long, devoured by readers. Self-esteem initiatives permeated American schools. Self-esteem became the way of understanding ourselves, our personalities, our interactions with others. Nowadays, however, few people think much about the concept of self-esteem—but perhaps we should.
Self-Esteem: An American History is the first historical study to explore the emotional politics of self-esteem in modern America. Written with verve and insight, Ian Miller’s expert analysis looks at the critiques of self-help that accuse it of propping up conservative agendas by encouraging us to look solely inside ourselves to resolve life’s problems. At the same time, he reveals how African American, LGBTQ+, and feminist activists have endeavored to build positive collective identities based on self-esteem, pride, and self-respect.
This revelatory book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of mental health and well-being, and in how the politics of self-esteem is played out in today’s US society and culture.
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Seitenzahl: 508
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
Self-Esteem: An Introduction
Self-esteem’s critics
Narcissistic modernity?
Activism and self-esteem
Notes
1 Happiness
From self-conceit to self-esteem
From character trait to emotional sickness
Self-esteem and popular culture
Pathological personalities
Self-esteem and the counterculture
Notes
2 Race
“Negro inferiority”
Black and white dolls
Black rage
Black power
A proud Black culture
Did Black self-esteem improve?
The persistence of low self-esteem
Notes
3 Sexuality
Sickness and psychopathologies
Respectable gays
Lesbian self-esteem
Being Black and gay
Positive gay therapies
AIDS
Notes
4 Mothers
Emotional growth and the American family
Life’s emotional foundations
Bad parents?
The “other” families
Notes
5 School
Educational psychology
Self-enhancing schools
Redesigning teachers and curricula
Self-esteem and Black children
Notes
6 Teenagers
Pathological teenagers
Teenage Satanists with low self-esteem
Self-esteem and teenage problems
Notes
7 Girls and Women
Feminist self-esteem
A revolution within?
Beautifying and dieting
School girls
Biological or environmental difference?
Notes
8 A Self-Esteem Task Force
A new task force
An out-there idea?
A social vaccine
Critical perspectives
Criminals, gangstas, and classroom avengers
Notes
9 The Twenty-first Century
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
Dedicated to the memory of John Kevin Miller
SELF-ESTEEM
An American History
Ian Miller
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Ian Miller 2024
The right of Ian Miller to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5940-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934728
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
This book took a number of years to write and was written alongside commencing a permanent academic role at Ulster University. I would like to thank those colleagues at Ulster University who have encouraged my career and to whom I am indebted for having kindly offered ongoing support. These include Justin Magee, Gerard Leavey, Conor Heffernan, Don MacRaild, and Kyle Hughes.
The project involved various trips to libraries and archives between 2018 and 2022, a period interrupted by the COVID pandemic. In particular, I would like to thank the staff at Wellcome Collection, the British Library, and Bishopsgate Library. The research benefited immensely from a number of exchange trips and academic talks. In November 2022, I was fortunate enough to spend a month visiting HEX (Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences), University of Tampere, Finland, and would like to acknowledge the support and interest among the excellent cluster of historians interested in emotions and experience at the Centre.
Aspects of this research were delivered at the Critical Perspectives on Mental Health seminar series (University of York), the European Association for the History of Human Sciences conference (Sigmund Freud Private University, Tempelhof Airport, Berlin), Ulster University’s School of Psychology seminar series, the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine conference, the Institute for Medical Humanities annual conference (Durham University), the Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science conference (Emory University) and the European University Institute (Florence). I wish to thank the organizers and participants at these talks for their insightful feedback, which has helped shape this book.
Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to work with an excellent group of postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers in medical history. I would like to acknowledge my PhD researchers Rebecca Watterson, Eugenie Scott, Hannah Brown, Rebecca Brown, and Michael Kinsella, as well as Rhianne Morgan. Also at Ulster University, I am particularly indebted to Ian Thatcher, whom I wish to acknowledge for his ongoing enthusiasm for this project and my career. Further afield, I am grateful for the ongoing support shown by Ida Milne and Bryce Evans, as well as numerous scholarly societies with which I became involved during the writing process, including the Society for the Social History of Medicine, History UK, and the Royal Irish Academy.
Most importantly, I wish to acknowledge Pauline, Katie, and Sarah Miller, and also Miriam Trevor. Finally, I am eternally grateful to Laura Garland for her ongoing support and love.
August 2023
Self-Esteem: An Introduction
In the twentieth century, the idea of self-esteem gained enormous influence. Psychologists published a staggering amount of research on the subject. Readers turned eagerly to self-help manuals hoping to confront their flailing self-image. Self-esteem experts came along, some from the psychology profession, some from outside. Self-esteem programs became increasingly popular in clinics, homes, and schools. Self-esteem became the way of understanding ourselves, our personalities, our interactions with others. After World War II, African Americans, feminists, and LGBTQ+ activists tried to collectively improve their self-esteem, pride, and self-respect, believing this to be a foundation for social equality and acceptance. Nowadays, we take for granted the idea that our self-esteem levels, whether these are high or low, profoundly influence how we feel as we go about our lives, and how well we succeed in life. Few of us think much about the nature of self-esteem, or where the idea came from, or how we apply it to our lives. But perhaps we should.
Some scientists believe that self-esteem levels are currently plummeting across the West, particularly in countries that tolerate higher levels of social inequality. Seeing low self-esteem as a social justice matter, they argue that this widespread emotional decline stems from harmful, but potentially rectifiable, socioeconomic and political conditions. Social epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that:
While we are all used to the idea that there are pollutants and carcinogens in the environment that have to be reduced in order to diminish the burden of physical disease, we are less used to the idea of tackling harmful emotional or psychological environments. Yet if the causes of heightened levels of social anxiety are the source of serious damage to social life and well-being, they surely warrant as much political and public attention as the air we breathe.1
In the West, we live in an “emotional environment” shaped by capitalism and individualism, although we tend to go about our lives without reflecting on the influence of these forces on our inner feelings. This book beckons readers to think about low self-esteem not as an innate, natural human feeling, but, on the contrary, as an inner feeling, a psychological state, influenced profoundly by the particular political, cultural, and socioeconomic structures, environments, and circumstances that envelop us.
Different cultures and societies understand, experience, and manage feelings in particular ways. Some attach tremendous importance to certain feelings (such as self-esteem) in ways that others don’t. Historians of emotions argue that collective feelings also change over time as these cultures and societies transform.2 As Western societies changed over time, the emotional environments embedded within them fluctuated and altered, bringing with them new collective emotional experiences. After World War II, self-esteem truly began to concern Westerners in ways that it previously hadn’t. This book sets out to find out why, focusing on America. While researching this book, I initially intended to cross-compare America with other Western countries, but then decided to explore America alone. I made this decision upon discovering the wealth of material on self-esteem published in that country. Indeed, Americans have produced such a large amount of literature that it began to seem as though there was something particularly American about the self-esteem that demanded investigation.
Adopting a somewhat sweeping longue durée sociological approach, it’s possible to think about America’s recent fascination with self-esteem as having arrived as part of the West’s historical transition away from small communities and religious authority toward modern urban life and democratic society. Older societies were less mobile, meaning that people were more familiar and intimate with one another. In those less competitive societies, it didn’t seem necessary to constantly monitor what others were thinking of us, unlike how so many of us obsessively do today. Self-esteem and social standing came from personal and moral conduct, as well as behavior, and less from social status, wealth, or self-image.3 The arrival of social modernity profoundly altered how we thought about, and assessed, ourselves; modern life changed Western consciousness, as our worldviews were restructured in new and unfamiliar ways. The West was made modern not only by revolution, industrialization, and the Enlightenment, but also by the advent of a “society of strangers.” Rapid and sustained population growth increased mobility over expansive distances, concentrated people in large cities, separated individuals and families from each other, and broke the strong communal ties that once characterized premodern societies.4
Our mentalities changed too. Modernization, with its disruption of social, familial, and geographic roots, brought significant emotional consequences.5 Urbanization cut people off from one another, heightening feelings of isolation and unfamiliarity with others; capitalism encouraged Westerners to be competitive rather than communal.6 The industrial, urban-based societies that developed from the late eighteenth century offered choice, freedom, independence, potentially even happiness, but they also raised everyone’s potential to feel alone, alienated, uncompetitive, and inferior. While encouraging success, happiness, and competitiveness, modernity left many of us feeling isolated, inferior, doubtful, and lonely.7 As one critic outlines: “The lonely isolated person is endemic to neoliberal capitalism; in this sense, the system itself is unhealthy and breeds problems and unhappiness.” Others believe that the historical shift toward urban living produced specific psychobiological changes in our brains and psyche, creating the mental health concerns that are rampant in today’s urbanized cultures.8
Nowadays, those of us living in the West are less likely than our predecessors to die of material poverty or hunger (although, of course, such problems still exist), but we do seem to suffer more widely from depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and bipolar conditions. Some researchers attribute this to the alienating circumstances of modern social life.9 The increase in diagnoses of these mental health complaints is especially prevalent in industrialized Western countries. It was not until the 1990s that people living in communist countries – for example, China – started thinking of themselves in psychological terms. Before then, China had no psychotherapeutic culture. The country’s collectivist politics mitigated against anything suspiciously reminiscent of Western individualism.10
The post-World War II period was a time when capitalism, immigration, loss of community, and consumerism accelerated a Western emotional epidemic of isolation and dissatisfaction; it was an era when feelings of emptiness, low self-esteem, and despair began to flourish. The so-called “empty self” emerged – someone who felt a desperate constant yearning to be loved, soothed, and made whole; who sought to fill an inner emptiness, to develop confidence, and to make contact with others.11 Again, this was a consequence of social change. After the war, many Westerners, Americans in particular, moved to the suburbs. They lived alongside people whom they did not know, and often felt estranged and distant from those around them, struggling to make new connections. Learning to get along with unfamiliar people, developing enough strength of personality to do so, all on top of being socially and economically successful, became essential, although this ultimately proved difficult for many.
The “other-directed person” began to dominate American society: a person who could identify themselves only with reference to others, constantly comparing what they earned, owned, consumed, and believed in. At the same time, a thriving market grew for books on positive thinking. The confident, socially extroverted personality became the new American ideal, and remains so today.12 Nonetheless, it is striking how little attention self-help, including associated ideas such as self-esteem, has received from historians given its enormous influence.13
Postwar affluence allowed most Americans to stop worrying about basic physical needs such as hunger and shelter. In a new era of abundance, time was freed up to focus on non-essential, emotional needs.14 In the 1950s, humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow influentially defined these as esteem, belongingness, and love.15 Forty years later, psychologist Julia A. Boyd recalled:
Both my mother and father were raised by deeply religious Southern parents. From their parents my parents learned the basics of life: the Bible got you into heaven, strong discipline taught you respect, and common sense kept you alive. Self-esteem wasn’t the issue for my parents or their parents. Survival was their primary goal … The concept of loving one’s self was a foreign concept to my parents, because it was a foreign concept to their parents … The majority of us had parents who were good at fulfilling our physical needs.16
But we didn’t become happier. In light of rising psychiatric diagnoses, many people speculate that we are living through an “age of anxiety” or a catastrophic “mental health epidemic.” Writing in the context of the 2020 COVID pandemic and its detrimental impact on our mental wellbeing, sociologist Jason Schnittker argued: “If there ever were an age of anxiety, it seems to be now. As a category, anxiety disorders are the most common psychiatric disorders in the United States.” Like other sociologists, Schnittker attributes this to “the accumulation of slow-moving transformations, spanning eras and generations.”17 As societies modernized, anxiety followed. Alain Ehrenberg, in his study of rising depression diagnoses, similarly surmises that the mindsets and attitudes characteristic of Western modernity drove a portentous epidemiological change. Historical emancipation from religious authority “made us persons without guides, progressively placing us in a situation in which we need to judge what surrounds us by ourselves and construct our own reference points.” Ultimately, Ehrenberg portrays depression as a pathology of a (Western) culture that privileges responsibility and initiative but ends up creating only a “pathology of inadequacy.”18 Similarly, historians of emotions frame loneliness as a “disease of civilization,” a feeling that became commoner from the nineteenth century largely due to industrialization, modernization, and the privileging of individual over collective needs.19
Of course, we should be cautious of taking health statistics at face value. The actual prevalence of (often vaguely defined) emotional states is impossible to know, and just as many Americans claim to feel happy as they do sad or depressed. Doctors tend only to see the most advanced, serious cases; diagnoses are shaped by a broad range of factors that change over time. And just because societies begin talking more about certain emotional states (such as low self-esteem) doesn’t necessarily mean that those conditions are actually increasing, but rather that societies become more concerned about them at particular times. Nonetheless, it still seems feasible that low self-esteem is yet another emotional malaise connected to modern ways of living. Hierarchical, competitive societies lead too many people to view themselves as “lower,” “inferior,” and “less admirable.” Low self-esteem tends not to be categorized as a sickness per se, but as an affective state with enormous potential to lead to more severe mental health and psychosocial problems, and “a cancer in the midst of our social life.”20
Self-esteem’s critics
Interest in self-esteem surged after World War II largely because of psychology’s more general growing influence. Only in the twentieth century did Westerners start thinking of themselves comprehensively in psychological terms, and with reference to ideas about emotional wellbeing. Psychology as we know it today developed from the late nineteenth century, when Sigmund Freud published his influential psychoanalytic theories and American psychologist William James transformed psychology from its philosophical roots into a therapeutic endeavor.21 Psychology’s development took many turns and directions. Nonetheless, and particularly after the war, psychological thought, practice, and expertise impacted hugely on American society.22 We became “psychological subjects,” viewing ourselves and the world around us in affective terms.23 We started to think about ourselves in relation to our emotions and feelings, and less as social, economic, or political beings (although all of these were deeply intertwined with the psychological). Psychology played a major role in “inventing our selves.”24 According to social theorist Nikolas Rose, “human beings have come to understand and relate to themselves as psychological beings, to interrogate and narrate themselves in terms of a psychological inner life that holds the secrets of their identity, which they are to discover and fulfil.”25 In this context, the idea of self-esteem took root and flourished.
While writing this book, I often found myself guilty of referring to self-esteem in imprecise ways that lacked rigorous definition, and using the term interchangeably with related concepts. For clarification, self-esteem is the term psychologists use for how we value and perceive ourselves. Self-confidence is a related term, referring to our belief in ourselves and our abilities. However, it is possible to be confident about abilities while suffering low self-esteem. Self-image refers more specifically to the ways in which we see ourselves, while self-concept refers to three connected components: self-image, self-esteem, and the ideal self. In this book I also discuss at length related terms such as pride – gay pride, Black pride, for example. Feeling inferior, or ashamed of oneself can be loosely defined as the opposite of feeling proud. While inferiority complexes operate on a personal, individual level, activist groups have often used the concept to describe a collective feeling of being made to feel inferior by dominant social groups, and upheld increasing self-esteem as the solution.
Psychology and religion have had a precarious relationship. Pride is one of Christianity’s seven deadly sins.26 Although much self-esteem advice was initially written from a religious perspective, by the 1970s the church felt far more threatened by psychologists. Secular psychological expertise was rapidly supplanting Christianity’s traditional role as the source of social guidance and authority. That decade saw an unprecedented expansion of the self-help book market, which accounted for more than 15 percent of bestselling books in America.27 A religious language of suffering now became supplanted with a diagnostic one.28
Traditionally, Christianity called for a denial of the self, but, as sociologist James L. Nolan Jr. argues, the self – largely thanks to psychology – is no longer to be surrendered, denied, or sacrificed. Instead, it exists to be esteemed, actualized, unfettered, and affirmed.29 Broadly speaking (and there were many exceptions within Christianity), traditional religion encouraged conformity and preached punishment. The self-esteem movement promised the opposite: liberation from all constraints.30 In the 1970s, Paul C. Vitz portrayed psychology as a cult of the self. Self-worship was replacing God worship, but Vitz believed that God provided more than enough love and should decide how happy we feel. Self-help amounted to atheism.31 These debates continue in the twenty-first century.32 (Of course, it’s possible to accuse religion of causing harm. In his popular book Selfie, Will Storr insists that his Catholic upbringing instilled within him an overbearing sense of guilt and shame inculcated by the Church’s fetishization of low self-esteem and self-hatred.33)
However, even within psychological circles, the concept of self-esteem has been regularly questioned for its uncertainty and vagueness. Self-esteem is a firmly established psychological category, one considered to be of utmost importance, but confusion prevails about its precise nature. No matter how much research is undertaken (and there is a lot of it), the idea of self-esteem remains ambiguous, lacking precise definition. The term self-esteem is used widely but uncritically.34 In 1979, social psychologist Morris Rosenberg, a leading expert, admitted: “It is somewhat astonishing to think that after decades of theory and research on the self-concept, investigators are as far as ever from agreeing on what it is or what it includes.” In 1981, another prominent expert, Stanley Coopersmith commenced his book, The Antecedents of Self-Esteem, with a prefixed warning that “so little is known about the conditions and experiences that enhance or lessen self-esteem,” adding that “there is not one single theoretical context in which self-esteem can be considered without accepting a number of vague and often unrelated assumptions.”35 In the twenty-first century, researchers still describe the concept of self-esteem as “vague” and “elusive.”36 But, nevertheless, the basic idea of self-esteem thrives.
Some social psychologists describe self-esteem as a modern “social imaginary”: a broad understanding of the world embraced by large numbers of people that, at some point, became so taken for granted that we all forgot that this way of constructing things was not necessarily the only way.37 Self-esteem became so central to American culture that, nowadays, few people ask where the idea came from or reflect upon how it is used. Self-esteem, as an idea, is now “naturalized.” To borrow from sociologist Frank Furedi, “so widespread are deliberations about self-esteem that it is easy to overlook the fact that the problems associated with it are of relatively recent invention.” Intriguingly, Furedi also states: “The self-esteem deficit is a cultural myth that is continually promoted by its advocates.”38
“Imaginaries.” “Myths.” One might conclude that self-esteem isn’t real after all, that it’s been fabricated, for whatever reasons, by psychologists. Certainly, critics accuse psychologists of labeling behaviors as illness and normal emotions as inner sickness. At some point in therapeutic history, sadness became depression and sad people turned into patients requiring therapeutic and psychopharmaceutical intervention. In their pursuit of happiness, Westerners started to feel unduly afraid of natural feelings such as fear and sadness.39 The most determined critic was Hungarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz who, from the 1960s, dismissed mental health diagnoses as a “myth” lacking objective reality. He argued that psychiatric diagnosis captured behaviors that were deemed antisocial.40 This pathologizing of natural emotions unnecessarily encouraged people to feel abnormal, depressed, even traumatized.41 One example of the fluidity and subjectivity of mental health diagnosis is the formal categorization by the American Psychiatric Association, which remained in place until 1973, of homosexuality as a psychological disorder requiring therapy.42
Psychology undoubtedly creates its own subject matter, but I would disagree with perspectives that portray this simply as a top-down process.43 There is no simple distinction between “constructed” and “real.” Ian Hacking discusses the “looping effect” concept, whereby psychologists and social scientists initially develop new knowledge about a type of person under their observation. Hacking uses the example of the “criminal” or “homosexual,” but the “low self-esteem person” also suits our needs here. Once new knowledge is created of this person and becomes known to the person classified, it changes the way these individuals behave and think about themselves. This changing behavior then loops back forcing experts to reclassify the knowledge they had originally assumed. Hence, understandings, and the behavior, of low self-esteem individuals are unstable, and can change over time and in different places. The personality type under examination is, using Hacking’s term, a “moving target.”44 In that sense, we interact with new disease classifications. People classified in certain ways grow into the ways described, but these descriptions are constantly revised.45 For example, even if we suggest that “race” isn’t real, the effects of dividing people into different races undoubtedly are tangible.
I would argue though that these experts have played a pivotal role in establishing ideas about which of our emotional states are “good” or “bad,” “positive” or “negative,” “healthy” or “unhealthy.” We believe that low self-esteem isn’t “normal” or “healthy” largely because psychologists have told us so. It threatens the pursuit of happiness, the West’s idealized emotional state.46 However, it would be going too far to dismiss the concept of self-esteem entirely. Undoubtedly, the psy-sciences carry tendencies to advance fictional images of the idealized, emotionally healthy human being, one brimming with self-esteem, confidence, and happiness, a central theme of this book. Storr describes this perfect person as an “extroverted, slim, beautiful, individualistic, optimistic, hard-working, socially aware yet high self-esteeming global citizen with entrepreneurial guile and a selfie camera.”47 But we risk overlooking real emotional suffering by denying, or not taking seriously enough, low self-esteem as a significant modern problem.
Moreover, we need to critically interrogate how American society has experienced and manage self-esteem, even if doubts exist about the concept’s veracity. For all we know, self-esteem might well be merely another example of meaningless “psychobabble,” but the point still stands that self-esteem evolved into arguably the most influential psychological concept, one used to explain all manner of personal, emotional, and social problems. All of us now experience our lives with reference to ideas about our self-esteem. We need a better understanding of its history, politics, and implications, and we need to take seriously the vast numbers of people who willingly absorbed the idea, imbuing it with profound meaning, and who experienced negative self-image as fundamentally disabling.
Narcissistic modernity?
In the 1970s, fears emerged that Americans had created a menacing new world characterized by a dangerously self-absorbed culture. Self-obsession was discussed as the decade’s American plague. The debates continued well into the 2000s, when some social critics insisted that modern Americans had lost any sense of obligation beyond the narrow compass of their self-absorbed lives. Twenty-first-century American youngsters seem noticeably more narcissistic than their predecessors, the Gen Xers and the Baby Boomers. Such literature undoubtedly caricatures young Americans as self-centered, narcissistic egomaniacs, while disdainfully ignoring their many positive attributes, and failing to recognize that narcissism had its complexities and contradictions.48
Rather than offering yet another study of narcissism, this book draws attention to the harmful emotions that often loom beneath fragile masks of egotism. It explores self-esteem as a feeling or emotion resting somewhere below the narcissistic scale, a psychological state potentially healthier than narcissism.49 The popularity of self-help courses and self-esteem books suggests that a buoyant market exists of people who struggle to feel happy and confident. “Self-obsession” has not always led to excessive, unwarranted self-love. Take this quote from Storr’s aforementioned book in which he laments Western cultural obsession with achieving perfection and securing positive approval from others to bolster self-esteem, a trend he believes has intensified greatly since his 1980s youth. He agrees that, collectively, our mentalities changed in recent decades. Now, hazardous psychological agents exist in our emotional environment because Western society transformed for the worse:
We’re living in an age of perfectionism, and perfectionism is the idea that kills. Whether its social media or pressure to be the impossibly “perfect” twenty-first-century iterations of ourselves, or pressure to have the perfect body, or pressure to be successful in our careers, or any of the other myriad ways in which we place overly high expectations on ourselves and other people, we’re creating a psychological environment that’s toxic.50
One might read from this not so much an overriding narcissistic love of oneself as an underlying deficit of faith in oneself that is pervasive in modern Western society. This raises questions about whether narcissism’s critics have failed to fully acknowledge the realities of sadness, stress, worry, anxiety, or depression across all generations, and particularly among the young, a group that forms much of the focus of this book. Storr, when reflecting upon self-obsession, developed instead a narrative of inner sadness, of inabilities to live up to social pressures that ultimately harmed emotional wellbeing. We should take these matters more seriously.
At this point there emerges a question of fundamental importance to this study: if self-esteem levels are shaped by political, cultural, and socioeconomic forces, why have self-help experts consistently advised us to self-improve and work on our inner mentalities, instead of actively pursuing sociopolitical change? This paradox points to Western psychology’s potential to discourage reflection upon the world residing beyond the confines of the mind, to individualize and depoliticize life’s circumstances, and to advocate an intent focus on inner emotional work that conceals the structural roots of our problems. In the process of replacing religious authority with self-referential forms of governmentality, we developed a therapeutic culture hellbent on personal transformation without consideration of structural forces and toxic emotional environments. This is dysfunctional. A purely psychological view of human difficulties mystifies social reality.51 It fails to tackle head-on the emotional misery that many people consider characteristic of capitalism.
The rise of therapeutic culture was first noted in the 1960s and, since then, its critics have lambasted a decline of communal values, increased personal isolation, and heightened reliance on mental health experts.52 The term “therapeutic state,” coined by Szasz, refers to political strategies that encourage individuals to internalize and personally resolve life’s problems.53 Typically, these strategies direct blame for social problems toward individuals and then entice them to improve through therapeutic self-help means. The myth of meritocracy, which persuades us to believe that success arises from hard work, only adds to the anxiety, despair, and powerlessness felt by those encouraged to blame themselves for life’s misfortunes.54
A conservative backlash occurred from the 1970s that rallied against the counterculture. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s presidency further weakened fights for social justice in part by stressing the importance of individual endeavor rather than government action as a way of fostering happiness, character, and virtue. Therapy was a vehicle that conveyed Reaganite notions of individual responsibility. In the West during the Cold War years, overtly authoritarian forms of governance were out of the question. Governance was achieved by educating citizens, and by providing the freedom to take advice on board (such as self-help) Neoliberal governance is coercive in the sense that it encourages us to govern ourselves while ostensibly offering us freedom. Capitalist mentalities hold each of us responsible and accountable for our actions and wellbeing by presenting life’s problems as fundamentally personal, not structural, in origin. In their reluctance to fully address social issues, deliberately or otherwise, capitalism and Western psychology share common ground.55
Similar accusations are currently leveled at the fashionable mindfulness movement, also criticized for a naive blindness to structural inequalities. Some slam the “mindfulness revolution” as banal capitalist spirituality that willfully avoids sociopolitical transformation. Mindfulness educators refuse to recognize and resist the inequitable, individualistic, market-based society that creates widespread inner distress. Wellness has been presented as a syndrome itself that reduces dreams of social change to individual transformation. Suspiciously, mindfulness techniques have been harnessed by the corporate world. All of this encourages us to adjust to the status quo instead of rallying against it. Downplaying socioeconomic and political context dissuades people from thinking about and challenging social inequity.56 Skeptic Ronald E. Purser argues that “anything that offers success in our unjust society without trying to change it is not revolutionary. It just helps people cope.” Purser describes mindfulness as a “tool of self-discipline disguised as self-help.” For him, “the best we can hope for is palliative care in a neoliberal nightmare, adapting to the brutal forces that afflict us. This is a morally and spiritually bankrupt way to imagine human lives.”57 Another variant is the idea of “grit,” which emphasizes that success depends upon what how we respond psychologically when we fail.58 Resilience is yet another concept with a surprisingly long and intriguing history. It became widely used in psychology from around the 1960s. It was popularized by being used to describe soldiers who returned from conflict seemingly free from conditions such as PTSD. It is currently central to twenty-first-century ideas about positive psychology and mindfulness.59
According to these accounts, psychological knowledge equips us with emotional stamina to endure, but never challenge, adverse circumstances and injustices, being in that sense deeply conservative. Self-image improvement leaves intact harmful emotional environments. Turning to self-help alleviates feelings of despair, anxiety, and low self-worth, but overlooks the broader external roots of negative inner feelings.60 This has been described as seeking “biographical solutions for structural crises.”61 Critic Carl Cederström writes that “the optimistic notion that everyone could actualize their inner potential has now turned into a cruel and menacing doctrine, strategically employed to sustain and normalize the structural inequalities in contemporary capitalism.”62 In the seemingly helpful, innocuous self-help book, a new apolitical self is forged.63 The concept of self-esteem, its critics insist, tries to cast us as isolated individuals rather than interconnected parts of sociopolitical units.
In this book, I trace how, gradually over time, the self-esteem movement urged us to forget the broader external determinants of our more destructive emotions. It outlines how negative emotions became depoliticized, isolated into personal, individual challenges that we alone, all by ourselves, needed to overcome. Working on one’s self-esteem became marketed as the solution to life’s problems, an approach devoid of sociopolitical context and woefully divorced from social realities. In reality, low self-esteem is probably a telling symptom of the modern West’s inherent problems. (This is not to say that American conservative rhetoric is entirely uncritical of the self-esteem movement. Indeed, conservative culture is closely linked to the aforementioned religious groups that view self-help with suspicion, and scorn participation trophies and other schemes that have become increasingly common in American school education. Nonetheless, and perhaps ironically, conservative religious critics and self-esteem advocates share common agendas in advocating reactionary, rather than socially revolutionary, political agendas.)
A revealing example of how low self-esteem has been portrayed as the cause of social ills (rather than vice versa) is found in a foreword to Sandy McDaniel and Peggy Bielen’s Project Self-Esteem: A Parent Involvement Program for Elementary-Age Children (1986), written by influential American author and motivation speaker Jack Canfield:
As an educator and facilitator deeply concerned with self-esteem, I have conducted intensive self-esteem seminars for over 26,000 people. It is an interesting commentary on our educational system that hundreds of thousands of adults find the need to spend $250 to $500 for weekend workshops to learn to “feel better about themselves.” We live in a country with many people who don’t like themselves. Riddled with guilt, fear and psychological ignorance, many people live in chronic emotional and relational pain, some of it acute and some of it what we have grown to accept as “normal.”
In attempts to numb out this pain, millions turn to alcohol, drugs, sex, workaholism, television addiction, overeating, smoking, and withdrawal as a means of coping; anything so as not to experience the pain and hopelessness that accompanies their loneliness, separation, and rejection. According to many recent polls, four out of five Americans have low self-esteem. What’s worse, the results of low self-esteem show up everywhere – in low productivity, academic underachievement, illness, depression, violent crimes, child abuse, incest, and rape – all of which have been on the rise recently. With statistics like these, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
But don’t despair. There is really a lot of good news around. Answers to the problems, solutions that address their core cause, are starting to show up across the country.64
One answer, of course, is to work on one’s self-esteem. While we might expect self-help advice to be cheerful, hopeful, and supportive, the emphasis on rape, incest, child abuse, and acute mental illness appears unexpectedly. Their incorporation in self-help books is morally persuasive, placing obligations on readers to work on their own self-esteem, and also on that of their children and pupils. (McDaniel and Bielen’s book was aimed at both teachers and parents.) Improving one’s self-esteem is certainly optional. Readers of Project Self-Esteem could choose to discard the solutions on offer if they wished, but ignoring them altogether had potentially dire moral implications for the young. Far from optimistic, Canfield’s foreword renders visible the persuasive undertones that are rife in much self-help advice.
Jack Canfield saw little need to promote structural change. Why bother campaigning for new laws to protect women against rape, prevent child abuse, and improve educational facilities? Why waste time considering the socioeconomic conditions that breed violence, abuse, rape, and substance misuse? In the 1980s, boosting one’s self-esteem was all that was needed to make these problems magically disappear. At least that was the logic of capitalist-driven interpretations of self-esteem advice. From the 1990s, Canfield acquired huge popularity as a motivational speaker and self-styled godfather of self-esteem with his Chicken Soup series of books.
We can certainly opt out of working on our self-esteem. But when experts warn us that the consequences include children growing up delinquent, relationships suffering, and an increased likelihood of turning to drugs and alcohol, does it genuinely leave us with much choice? This is a manner of governing that relies not on institutions or state power or violence, but on securing citizens’ voluntary compliance.65 To speak of this governance is not to imply social control directed by governments or the medical profession, but to recognize the existence of morally persuasive forms of power that urge us to govern ourselves in particular ways and align our behaviors with core capitalist values.
Activism and self-esteem
But then again, is the therapeutic state really so pervasive and effective at quietening political activism? Some political scientists warn that the therapeutic state “looms as a menacing Leviathan.” Other critics present therapeutic culture as ubiquitously successful in directing attention away from structural inequalities.66 Philip Cushman, for instance, writes:
If we cannot entertain the realistic possibility that political structures can be the cause of personal, psychological distress, then we cannot notice their impact, we cannot study them, we cannot face their consequences, we cannot mobilize to make structural changes, and we will have few ideas about what changes to make. We will become politically incompetent. Perhaps we already are.67
In my view, these accounts of the rise of neoliberal emotional management tell only one side of a more intricate story. Some researchers query assumptions about therapeutic culture’s entirely insidious nature, arguing that there are tales to tell beyond it being a monolithic “harbinger of decline” and “social control.” Therapeutic culture can foster a greater recognition of pain and suffering. Rather than being solely self-indulgent, ideas about self-help, self-esteem, and self-respect have been used to assert individual rights to bodily autonomy, emotional wellbeing, and personal safety. Therapeutic culture offers opportunities to express and expose experiences among the least powerful groups through a language of emotional pain that persuasively articulates injuries to the self and might even help redress psychological damage. Therapeutic culture can therefore be multidimensional.68
In their 2015 book, Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis warn against casting therapeutic culture aside as entirely wrong-headed and pernicious. For them, “therapeutic culture’s complexity, its capacity to serve seemingly incongruous ends, has been overlooked by scholars and critics of the therapeutic.” All that materializes is a “cultural history of the therapeutic that is conceptually thin, ideologically blinkered and, unsurprisingly, not that useful.”69 Aubry and Travis urge us to better understand the vagaries of therapeutic culture’s evolution, the nuances of its aesthetics, the diverse implications of its politics, and the unexpected political and social functions it may have performed.
And that is where this book departs from the critics outlined above. I concur that self-help bolsters capitalist agendas, but argue that marginalized groups, particularly African American, LGBTQ+, and feminist activists, all identify self-esteem as a pressing problem for their communities. They link low self-esteem to social injustice, develop ways of articulating negatively experienced emotions, and actively seek to resolve psychological problems as part of their emancipation. These groups are deeply cognizant of the relationship between the structural and the emotional. Radicalism and therapy are not always entirely at odds, and many people have viewed inner self-work as an effective stepping-stone toward social change.70
Scholars of race, gender, and sexuality all argue that low self-esteem matters considerably to disadvantaged communities. In 2003, Black feminist author bell hooks lamented that cripplingly low self-esteem was epidemic among African Americans. This was more than a simple reflection of heightened psychological distress across America more generally. Additional to modernity’s general emotional stress, and unlike whites, Blacks contended with racism, school and workplace discrimination, and white supremacist culture, among a plethora of other challenges.71 Since the 1990s, clinical psychologist Walt Odets has argued that LGBTQ+ communities have internalized the stigma directed toward them. Despite an optimistic decade of gay pride and liberation in the 1970s, the 1980s AIDS crisis, which disproportionately affected gay men, hardly produced a gratifying self-image or improved straight peoples’ opinions. At worst, it left behind a legacy of grief, shame, and trauma among its survivors.72 The self-esteem of girls and women has been fiercely debated. In 1992, feminist Gloria Steinem published her Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem. However, feminists still inconclusively debate the value of individualistic self-help strategies for collective action.73 Critical studies of therapeutic culture, although sophisticated, insightful, and nuanced, tend to ignore the impacts of broader sociological forces on the marginalized. Bringing these groups into the fore, as this book does, will help develop a more rounded understanding of therapeutic culture.
In the 2020s, some attention has been paid to this hidden history with reference to self-care. Interest blossomed during the COVID pandemic. A spate of articles appeared that called attention to self-care’s radical origins. In Slate magazine, Aisha Harris argued that self-care first surfaced in the 1960s in radical Black Power and feminist political movements which insisted that taking control over one’s health (physical and emotional) was a radical act that implicitly challenged the lack of value granted to certain groups in patriarchal, white American culture. Here lay the foundations of twenty-first-century initiatives such as self-care and wellness.74 This was echoed by other online articles.75Teen Vogue magazine described the foundational role of the Black Panthers. At the time, George Floyd had recently been murdered and the Black Lives Matter movement was resurging.76 That same year, a BBC series similarly traced self-care ideas back to the Black Panther Party.77
I agree that, from the 1960s, activists, on behalf of the marginalized, used self-help techniques to advance agendas of collective improvement, with self-esteem being crucial to their activism. Improving one’s self-image was an intrepid first step toward collectively transforming the psyche of marginalized groups. Women, African Americans, LGBTQ+: all these communities actively, and publicly, strove to replace shame with pride. Thus emerged Black pride, gay pride, and so on. However, this book adds sophistication to the current historical narrative. For me, this presumption that self-care had its roots in late 1960s and early 1970s activism presents problems. Was the path between the 1960s and 2020s really so linear? What happened to self-care, or its antecedents, in the fifty-year period left unspoken about? Were radical Black and feminist self-care campaigns really as effective as nostalgically presumed? What opposition emerged toward them? And what of the LGBTQ+ activists who upheld self-esteem and pride as core collective goals, but whose efforts are rarely recalled?
Ultimately, this book portrays the radical capturing of self-help in the 1960s and 1970s, with its rallying call for self-esteem, self-love, and group pride as projects with considerable historical intricacy. For a start, as I demonstrate, feminists didn’t engage fully with psychological approaches such as self-esteem until the 1980s, not the late 1960s, partly due to lingering skepticism about whether the psy-sciences were supportive of patriarchal oppression. Recent self-care histories also overlook the fact that, despite Black Power’s efforts, low self-esteem persists as a major problem in African American communities, suggesting limitations to Black pride. Also, tensions existed between, and even within, the various marginalized groups. Historically, many white gay men held racist views toward Black gay men; men in the Black Power movement held conservative attitudes toward Black women; and Black attitudes toward Black gays could be unfavorable, to say the least.78 The 2020 US miniseries Mrs. America, which dramatized the 1970s battles between feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan with conservative women led by Phyllis Schlafly, foregrounded the complex intersections between gender, race, and sexuality, even within seemingly socially transformative strands of leftwing feminism. Critics still accuse mainstream feminism for catering first and foremost to white, middle-class Western women, while excluding women from other backgrounds.79 Intersectionality is important too. Some self-esteem books have been aimed at, for example, Black women, who feature in two groups subject to discrimination.80 (There are a number of minority groups that I do not cover exhaustively, partly through reasons of space, but also because they didn’t figure as prominently in my source material. These include Hispanics, Asian-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.)
To fully understand the history of self-esteem, we also need to explore the intersection of radical and capitalist-oriented self-help approaches. A key argument in this book is that, from the 1970s, self-esteem initiatives implemented in schools, as well as those advocated in popular self-help books, entirely ignored the strident work being done by activists trying to manage self-esteem and instead blamed social structures for worsening emotional wellbeing. Self-esteem advice, penned outside activist circles, promoted individual change while paying lip service at best to the external world and surrounding “emotional environments.” It generalized by ignoring the unique emotional needs of marginalized groups, speaking instead to a white, middle-class (even, initially, male) audience, whether that be parents, youngsters, or adults. A one-size-fits-all approach emerged, in keeping with the broader backlash against leftwing activism, which addressed the idealized, “normal” American, an individual who was not Black, gay, or working class. American definitions of a “normal” human being implicitly excluded both nonwhites and non-straights, while rendering women inferior to men.81
Hence, micro-practices such as reading a self-help book or attending a self-esteem class tacitly maintained the status quo simply by having nothing at all to say about the specific emotional needs of minority groups. What we might term “capitalist self-esteem advice” was silently anti-diversity, but also hugely influential in America. The fluidity and vagueness of the self-esteem concept, open to interpretation, difficult to define precisely, allowed the idea to appeal simultaneously to differing, even competing, political agendas. The neoliberal and emancipatory aspects of self-esteem coexisted in uneasy tension with each other.
African American, LGBTQ+, and feminist activists harnessed self-esteem to promote freedom, liberation, and social equality, but did so in the face of (sometimes in response to) contradictory conservative strategies intent on concealing social inequalities and discrimination. Exploring how minority groups spoke out about their experiences in a language based on therapy and emotions, and in the face of modernity, capitalism, and the conservative backlash, allows us to think more carefully about therapeutic culture’s history. By foregrounding activist groups in self-esteem’s history, a nuanced picture develops that moves beyond lamenting the emotional misery of capitalist modernity, one that is inclusive and sympathetic to the diversity of emotional experience and the multiple meanings and uses of therapeutic culture. Delving more fully into the intricacies of self-esteem’s politics reveals its curious capacity to simultaneously support, explicitly or implicitly, the politics of both liberation and conservatism. This shouldn’t surprise us too much. While most readers will no doubt be familiar with ideas of gay, Black, or female pride, it must be remembered that the term “pride” is also harnessed by rightwing activists, further demonstrating the concept’s fluidity. Groups such as the Proud Boys have recently emerged, a far-right, neo-fascist, white nationalist, and exclusively male organization, demonstrating further how concepts such as pride can be used simultaneously for conflicting purposes.
Before we enter into a fuller discussion of the complex politics of pride, it’s necessary to look further back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My opening chapter invites readers to think about how and why self-esteem, and associated ideas such as happiness and positive thinking, first gained such broad appeal in America. It will take readers through the decades in which self-esteem (and ideas such as inferiority complex) first began to permeate both professional psychological thought and American popular culture, asking why self-esteem, happiness, and self-confidence became so important to Americans.
Notes
1
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett,
The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-being
(Allen Lane, 2018), 3.
2
E.g. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter Stearns (eds.),
Emotions and Social Change: Towards a New Psychohistory
(Holmes and Meier, 1988).
3
Wilkinson and Pickett,
Inner Level
, 16.
4
James Vernon,
Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern
(University of Berkeley Press, 2010).
5
Peter Berger,
The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness
(Vintage Books, 1974).
6
For sociological perspectives, see Ulrich Beck,
Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity
(SAGE, 1992); Zygmunt Bauman,
The Individualized Society
(Polity, 2001).
7
Fay Bound Alberti,
A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion
(Oxford University Press, 2021).
8
David Forbes,
Mindfulness and its Discontents: Education, Self and Social Transformation
(Fernwood, 2019), 120; Nikolas Rose and Des Fitzgerald,
The Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City
(Princeton University Press, 2022).
9
Svend Brinkmann,
Diagnostic Cultures: A Cultural Approach to the Pathologization of Modern Life
(Routledge, 2016).
10
Li Zhang,
Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy
(University of California Press, 2020).
11
Philip Cushman,
Constructing the Self, Constructing America
(Addison-Wesley, 1995), 245–6.
12
David Riesman, with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer,
The Lonely Crowd
(Yale University Press, 1950); Norman Vincent Peale,
The Power of Positive Thinking
(Prentice Hall, 1952); Will Storr,
Selfie: How the West became Self-Obsessed
(Picador, 2017), 126.
13
Noted in Rebecca Richardson,
Material Ambitions: Self-Help and Victorian Literature
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), 2.
14
Ellen Herman,
The Romance of American Psychology
(University of California Press, 1995), 270–1.
15
Abraham H. Maslow,
Motivation and Personality
(Harper Row, 1954).
16
Julia A. Boyd,
In the Company of My Sisters: Black Women and Self-Esteem
(Dutton, 1993), 25–6.
17
Jason Schnittker,
Unnerved: Anxiety, Social Change, and the Transformation of Modern Mental Health
(Columbia University Press, 2021), 1.
18
Alain Ehrenberg,
The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age
(McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), xxx, 4–5, 8–9.
19
Alberti,
Biography of Loneliness
, 9, 16.
20
Wilkinson and Pickett,
Inner Level
, 19, 4.
21
Examples of critical overviews include Graham Richards,
Putting Psychology in its Place
(Routledge, 1996); Dai Jones and Jonathan Elcock,
History and Theories of Psychology: A Critical Perspective
(Arnold, 2001).
22
Herman,
Romance of American Psychology
, 310; see also James H. Capshew,
Psychologists on the March: Science, Practice and Professional Identity in America, 1929–1969
(Cambridge University Press, 1999).
23
Mathew Thomson,
Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain
(Oxford University Press, 2006).
24
Nikolas Rose,
Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood
(Cambridge University Press, 1996).
25
Rose,
Inventing Our Selves
, 22.
26
Michael Eric Dyson,
Pride
(Oxford University Press, 2006), 13.
27
Ronald W. Dworkin,
Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class
(Carroll and Graf, 2006), 173, 224.
28
For elaboration, see Charles Taylor,
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
(Harvard University Press, 1992).
29
James L. Nolan Jr.,
The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century’s End
(New York University Press, 1998), 3.
30
Maureen Stout,
The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down of America’s Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem
(Perseus Books, 2000), 15.
31
Paul C. Vitz,
Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship
, 2nd ed. (William. B. Eerdmans, 1977), 15–19.
32
Glynn Harrison,
The Big Ego Trip: Finding True Significance in a Culture of Self Esteem
(Inter-Varsity Press, 2013), 18–19.
33
Storr,
Selfie
, 92.
34
L. Edward Wells and Gerald Marwell,
Self-Esteem: Its Conceptualization and Measurement
(SAGE, 1976), 5, 7–8.
35
Morris Rosenberg,
Conceiving the Self
(Basic Books, 1979), 1; Stanley Coopersmith,
The Antecedents of Self-Esteem
, 2nd ed. (Consulting Psychologists Press, 1981), 1, 28.
36
E.g. Fiona King and Adrian Lohan, “Self-Esteem: Defining, Measuring and Promoting an Elusive Concept,”
REACH Journal of Special Needs Education in Ireland
, 29 (2016).
37
Peggy J. Miller and Grace E. Cho,
Self-Esteem in Time and Place: How American Families Imagine, Enact and Personalize a Cultural Ideal
(Oxford University Press, 2018), xxii, 82.
38
Frank Furedi,
Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age
(Routledge, 2004), 4, 159.
39
Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield,
All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry’s Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorder
(Oxford University Press, 2012); Allan V. Horwitz,
The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder
(Oxford University Press, 2012).
40
Thomas Szasz,
The Myth of Mental Illness
(Hoeber-Harper, 1961).
41
Furedi,
Therapy Culture
, 5–6.
42
Tommy Dickinson,
“Curing Queers”: Mental Health and Their Patients, 1935–74
(Manchester University Press, 2016).
43
Kurt Danzinger,
Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research
(Cambridge University Press, 1994).
44
Ian Hacking, “The Looping Effect of Human Kinds,” in Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack,
Symposia of the Fyssen Foundation. Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate
(Clarendon Press, 1995);
The Social Construction of What?
(Harvard University Press, 1999), 105.
45
Brinkmann,
Diagnostic Cultures
, 37.
46
Rose,
Psychological Complex
; Darrin M. McMahon,
In Pursuit of Happiness: A History from the Greeks to the Present
(Allen Lane, 2006).
47
Storr,
Selfie
, 18–19.
48
Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,”
New York
(23 August 1976); Edwin Schur,
The Awareness Trap: Self-Absorption instead of Social Change
(McGraw-Hill, 1976); Christopher Lasch,
Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
(W.W. Norton, 1979); Robert D. Putnam,
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
(Simon and Schuster, 2000); Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell,
The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in an Age of Entitlement
(Free Press, 2009); Elizabeth Lunbeck,
The Americanization of Narcissism
(Harvard University Press, 2014).
49
Lunbeck,
Americanization of Narcissism
, 109–12.
50
Storr,
Selfie
, 17.
51
Ronald E. Purser,
McMindfulness: How Mindfluness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
(Watkins Media, 2019), 110.
52
Philip Rieff,
The Triumph of the Therapeutic
(Chatto, 1966).
53
Thomas Szasz,
The Therapeutic State: Psychiatry in the Mirror of Current Events
(Prometheus, 1984).
54
Forbes,
Mindfulness and its Discontents
, 120.
55
Daniel Horowitz,
Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement that Aspired to Transform America
(Oxford University Press, 2017), 94, 224; Furedi,
Therapy Culture
, 93; Rose,
Inventing Our Selves
, 75; Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.),
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality
(University of Chicago Press, 1991); David Harvey,
A Brief History of Neoliberalism
(Oxford University Press, 2005), 65.
56
Carl Cederström and Andre Spicer,
The Wellness Syndrome
(Polity, 2014); Thomas Joiner,
Mindlessness: The Corruption of Mindfulness in a Culture of Narcissism
(Oxford University Press, 2017); Forbes,
Mindfulness and its Discontents
, 23, 28.
57
Purser,
McMindfulness
, 7–8, 245.
58
Angela Duckworth,
Grit: Why Passion and Resilience are the Secrets to Success
(Vermilion, 2017).
59
Joanna Bourke and Robin May Schott (eds.),
Resilience: Militaries and Militarization
(Palgrave, 2022).
60
Herman,
Romance of American Psychology
, 16; Wilkinson and Pickett,
Inner Level
.
61
Ole Jacob Madsen,
The Therapeutic Turn: How Psychology Altered Western Culture
(Routledge, 2014), 13.
62
Carl Cederström,
The Happiness Fantasy
(Press, 2018), 10–11.
63
Madsen,
Therapeutic Turn
, 13, 20.
64
Sandy McDaniel and Peggy Bielen,
Project Self-Esteem: A Parent Involvement Program for Elementary-Age Children
(B.L. Winch, 1986), vii.
65
Barbara Cruikshank,
The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects
(Cornell University Press, 1999), 4.
66
Andrew J. Polsky,
The Rise of the Therapeutic State
(Princeton University Press, 1991), 2–3, 6; Dana L. Cloud,
Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics: Rhetorics of Therapy
(SAGE, 1998), xv–xiv.
67
Cushman,
Constructing the Self
, 336–7.
68
Katie Wright,
The Rise of the Therapeutic Society: Psychological Knowledge and the Contradictions of Cultural Change
(New Academia Publishing, 2011).
69
Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis, “Rethinking Therapeutic Culture,” in Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis (eds.),
Rethinking Therapeutic Culture
(University of Chicago Press, 2015), 3.
70
Michael E. Staub, “Radical,” in Aubry and Travis,
Rethinking Therapeutic Culture
, 106.
71
bell hooks,
Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem
(Atria, 2003).
72
Walt Odets,
In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS
(Strand, 1995); Walt Odets,
Out of the Shadows: The Psychology of Gay Men’s Lives
(Penguin, 2019).
73
Gloria Steinem,
Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem
(Bloomsbury, 1992).
74
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2017/04/the_history_of_self_care.html
.
75
https://advice.theshineapp.com/articles/how-you-can-honor-the-radical-history-of-self-care
.
76
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-radical-history-of-self-care
.
77
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5GwXsvJp6q8PM2RLL2Dgc00/the-radical-history-of-self-care
.
78
Ibram X. Kendi,
How to Be an Anti-Racist
(Bodley Head, 2019), Chs. 14, 15.
79
Rafia Zakaria,
Against White Feminism
(Hamish Hamilton, 2021).
80
E.g. Julia A. Boyd,
In the Company of My Sisters: Black Women and Self-Esteem
(Penguin, 1997).
81
Julian B. Carter,
The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940
(Duke University Press, 2007).
